Rules Are Cool or Rules Are Cruel?

How many of you have rules at home? Do you have rules about when to eat? How to eat? How long you can watch television? How you should act? (no hitting, no spitting, no yelling?) Do you like the rules? I remember saying that I did NOT like some of the rules when I was little; especially at school. There were too many!!

Let's think about rules and play a game called "I wonder." I'm going to ask you a question that starts with "I wonder" and you guys are going to use your imagination and help me answer. In our country, we have a lot of rules about food -- how it has to be made before we buy it and eat it. I wonder what would happen if we didn't have any of those rules? (do you think it would be clean? Taste as good? would restaurants be as clean?) We also have a lot of rules in sports and games. I wonder what would happen if our games didn't have rules? (people would cheat and lie, we wouldn't know how to play -- it wouldn't be as fun) And what about on the road -- we have tons of rules on how to drive or ride our bikes on the road. I wonder what would happen if we didn't have those rules? (You could drive anywhere, stop when you want -- there would be crashes all the time!)

We have a lot of rules to live by, and most of them are good, and necessary. If we didn't have them, the world would be crazy!

God also gave us some rules to live by. They are called the 10 commandments and God gave them to Moses. There are 10 of them and they are very important:

1. Don't worship any other gods.

2. Don't make anything in your life more important than God.

3. Don't use God's name in a bad way.

4. Rest one day a week

5. Obey your parents

6. Don't kill

7. Be faithful to your family

8. Don't steal

9. Don't lie

10. Don't be greedy

It's important for us to learn these rules and to obey them! To help you, I'm going to give each of you a bookmark today to help you remember the 10 rules or commandments that God gave to us.

Ten Commandments Bookmark